to crawl upon your belly

What is it about snakes/centipedes/cockroaches that’s so creepy it triggers an instant desire to crush/annihilate? (Six inch long centipede in the kitchen this morning; minor riot.)

An internal, subjected function is rendered external and independent, therefore uncanny. The creatures enact circulatory and nervous functions (webs, synapses), and in looking at them, effecting separate wills, we feel as if we can no longer control ourselves; we feel ashamed, and as if we are being diminished – removed or displaced. So when a target population is called a bunch of cockroaches – its not to “other” them, exactly – it’s to represent them as “our” own filth, our biologic nature, which we should have some mastery over; the cockroaches are our shame; we have to correct ourselves, clean our own souls, behave properly.

Genocide is self correction.

Less floridly – media will take one’s idea from one and force it to squirm out of its context – they will make your own ideas frightening to you. The media is not trying to kill the arts – it is trying to get the artists to kill the arts, a project that has met with some success since the 80’s… where art, AIDS, poverty and drugs were all pulled out and made to crawl on their own, as if they were each our moral failing; they are not a natural set by any means, and they are not naturally or usefully separated from the web of life as if they had nothing to do with our full humanity (art is not a disease, poverty is not a drug, drugs are not an art; art is also not less weak…).